


Skeleton Fish

by pettiot



Series: Flickers [3]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F, Feeding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-09
Updated: 2012-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:00:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22430716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Isabela feeds Merrill and wishes she could cook.
Relationships: Isabela/Merrill
Series: Flickers [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1614220





	Skeleton Fish

  


She was feeling generous, and had thought the others were joining them, but they were not and thus she had ordered too much. Boiled beef, dumplings, carrots, cabbage, the everpresent ale and thick shot glasses of spirit. Fish, whole, eyes and fins and skeletons, purposely asked for a Fenris who was not there to make his faces. Isabela made her own.

Merrill looked at her and laughed. ‘I thought so too! I'm surprised the table's not groaning. That is a lot of food.’ 

‘It’s a pity I didn’t realise it before. We could have spared Corff’s kitchen slave the labour.’

‘Oh! But I’m hungry. And I like eating. I can’t stand the thought of waste. Labour or food.’ Merrill had a mobile mouth, and a face which committed to her lies wholeheartedly. She was too kind, Isabela thought. Who else would slit her own wrists for the hope it might bring to another? Not Isabela, for sure.

‘I’d like to cook a meal for you, one day.’ 

A gift, regretted as soon as given. Isabela could not describe the sudden shame, faint thoughts of her brief married indenture, left alone in that one room apartment with its overhot stove and not enough wind in her hair, battling with dual pots until the lot would fly off the balcony in a steaming, smoking arc, both dreading and longing for the sail on the horizon which would signify return and the ritual rape, and above all else a breaking of the monotony. 

'I didn’t know you could cook.’

‘Well, kitten. You can’t know everything about me, can you?’ 

Because Isabela had been thinking of other things, of some importance and intensity, her voice was condescending and remote. But Merrill could not believe of an Isabela who was remote, not when they sat with thighs warming each other’s, and smiled to bring Isabela to shame. She patted Isabela’s hand with fingers already oily.

‘You’re a good person to know, even in bits and pieces. So I think, anyway. If it matters what I think. It probably doesn't.’

Isabela placed a finger thoughtful on Merrill’s lip, where a careless passing dumpling had touched with grease. 

‘It matters. And...’ An apology of sorts, offered with a laugh. ‘I’m no more a mage than a cook.’

Her mother had been the secret mage, not the cook. Where was Isabela to learn? For several years in his dockside apartment she struggled alone. Failing and waiting and dreading, until a golden Antivan moved in across the road and dodged with shameless grace as a pot of desecrated soup cascaded down. Maker, she had even tried with the embroidery, and for all she could mend a sail or a net where necessary, the grace and artistry and flair had never come easy. Isabela was glad of that, though. Look at Anders’ little maternal memento, all his years of frozen terrified drool from his haunted sleep, soaked into a piece of embroidery his mother had spent years pricking and torturing out of linen. Did his mother have nightmares of how her son had resolved his life? 

No, Isabela was glad she was no mother or wife. If she was to be disappointed, let it be by her own failings. 

She could be a friend.

‘Will I regret eating it? This meal you'll be cooking me?' A flicker of mischievousness on Merrill's earnest face. 

‘Of course not. I’ll buy you whatever you want, kitten, and pretend I put it together myself. You need to eat more, and better than bits of fruit from a battered lot. Hunger is absolutely the worst.’

‘Mm.’ Merrill angled for the shredded beef. ‘I would have thought pride, not hunger. The lore has pride at the peak—’

‘Not demons!’ It was always about demons. Damned Kirkwall. ‘Anyway, pride is just another sort of hunger. Hunger for acclaim, you see? All suffering is hunger.’

‘Ughn.’ Merrill’s jaw popped. She ate small pieces, but fast, tiny throat bobbing. Isabela watched. ‘What about sloth?’

‘That’s just the absence of a hunger powerful enough to drive you to achieve. No, it all comes back to hunger.’

If Isabela failed, remnants smoking in the streets filth below, if Isabela failed and he went hungry, then she went hungry too. It was an egalitarian marriage, of a sort. United in suffering. 

Emptying her mind if not her mouth of all this, Isabela felt the need for putting something inside. 

A knife appeared in her hand, Merrill’s eyes widening and lively. Isabela added a twirl, just for her, and split a fish longways, soft spine parting easily as butter. The carcass revealed a small puckered liver, which she lifted on the point of her blade. Merrill’s mouth was open, neck stretched like a little bird. Isabela placed the liver on her waiting tongue.

Merrill swallowed without chewing, eyelids fluttering with pleasure.

‘Oh, it’s been such a long time since I last ate fish.’

Suddenly Merrill’s voice and her presence, with her seemingly insipid words and the delicate scrolling vallaslin proving her tolerance for pain, the bands worn about her palms and wrists to hide the scars, the fragments of music falling through the cracks in conversation from the lutenist in the corner, the rising meal smells, swept over Isabela like the best kind of hunger. She wanted to take, and touch, and join together all these sensations and make them palpable.

She put her arm around Merrill’s waist and said, ‘Would you like a little more?’

Merrill lapped flaking flesh from Isabela’s table knife. ‘I never have time for food like this in the Alienage. Actually, I don’t think there even is food like this in the Alieange. Even if it is just around the corner. Strange, isn’t it, how proximity is never the truth of distance?’

‘You need to come out with us more, sweetheart. Truly. If you'd been on one of Hawke's all day hikes through a single warehouse you would know it''s not strange at all.’

She could not see Merrill eat too much, she decided.

‘Try this one.’ Isabela cut a piece which she knew was too large for Merrill’s usual small bites, and folded it whole into those waiting lips. Merrill Was unable to close her mouth wholly until several chews had passed, jaw still clicking, by which time Isabela was already waiting with the next piece.

Merrill could have avoided it, or said something, but did not. And there, her face was turning towards Isabela’s hand with the eagerness of a sunstarved daisy. 

Feel her own eagerness as sharp little teeth scraped her fingers, round Merrill’s thin waist, Isabela's apologising arm tightened. Each mouthful seemed to warm that tiny form against her own, making it solid, more real. 

Merrill’s mouth occupied with carrot, which only briefly boiled required extensive chewing, Isabela bent and took the mug waiting beside the skeleton fish, and the contents trembled in her hand, depths hiding a delightful thought. Isabela drank the mug, then the glass of spirits which followed, spilling slightly, and Merrill licked her fingers dry.

Isabela would have found her eagerness quite ridiculous, had she not enjoyed her moment of self-revelation. ( _Revelation?_ Fenris said somewhere, dry as his preferred vintage; _you mean in drink._ ) 

Eventually, they had to slow.

But still, no restraint. No control. As Merrill painstakingly licked the last of the grease from Isabela’s fingers, she thought it likely this debauched scene would have made Anders very happy, to have proved him right. Perhaps Fenris, too. Merrill never knew when to say no. Never knew when enough was enough. Isabela felt something akin to longing.

_If I could crawl inside her, I would._

‘I have so much food inside my stomach it aches.’ 

Merrill laid her head on the table next to the raped skeleton fish and began to softly snore. 

In mockery? Her kitten had more knowing than others attributed to her. 

‘How right it looks on you.’ Merrill’s eyes were open, one slanted across to focus, hazed, on Isabela. Could food intoxicate?

‘What?’ 

‘Your cheeky little smile. What are you thinking about?’

‘You. Being you.’

‘And what’s that, then? If I don’t know you, I think you can’t know much of me either. Not that there’s all that much to me.’

‘More than before.’ Beneath the table, Isabela rubbed her hand around that hot taut belly, and Merrill groaned again. ‘You, kitten, are the very opposite of what anyone would expect.’

‘I expect I can’t move.’

‘Shall I carry you to bed?’

‘Yes, oh, yes, please. I need to get my belt off.’ Her skin was shining. 'I need to—' an aimless hand, waved about. 'I need to, get it, get off, I—'

'I might not be able to cook to save a life, but I can certainly help with that.'

Isabela’s room was one room here, with even less of a window than that dockside apartment in which she burned her childhood and fucked an Antivan Crow who could cook up an absolute storm. One room, one bed, and a chest of belongings not treasured enough to lock up. Merrill weighed hardly anything at all, even weighted in the middle.

‘I’m bloated.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I feel like a gorged dog.’

‘What, still hungry? Hawke won’t be happy if you do anything to his hound, especially not barbeque it—’

‘I feel like I am a gorged dog, not like eating a gorged dog Oh, you know what I mean.’

Isabela was gentle in unbuckling the belt. Merrill was the very opposite of a gorged dog, all slender limbs, smooth skin, no fur. For all that there was still trace rice at the corner of her mouth. Her belly, bared for greater comfort, was white and stretched and swollen as a dragon’s egg.

Isabela knelt by the bed and stroked that smooth flushed skin.

‘You hardly ate, Isabela.’

‘I think I have, more or less, everything I want.’

An inchoate sound, and Merrill’s arms were around her. The fabric over her slight breasts smelled of dust and blood, and beef grease, and sweat. Merrill stroked her, and kissed her, and Isabela bit her tongue. 

A ripe little snowdrop, that potbelly, quivering and veined with green. Merrill’s physical smallness intensified Isabela’s passion. What an immense lack of restraint had reformed the original flesh into lines of purest prominence. And Isabela had no patience of her own but to revel in another’s lack. It was all hunger, in the end, all mouths and teeth and feeding, and licking of palms that tasted like salt.

‘You’re a glutton,’ said Isabela, stroking gently. She lowered her head to listen to the strained digestion. The bare swell of breast peeked from below Merril’s raised tunic.

Lazy lush eyes crossed those contours to meet Isabela half way. 

‘I don’t like to be hungry any more than you do. And I’m hungry more than I want to be. I want— so much, and it just never— I want—’

‘Don’t we all,’ Isabela thought of aspiration, and happiness, and pride. 

‘I think this is the least strange thing which has ever happened to me.’

‘Funny. I was just thinking how strange it was, how we came here.’

‘Not really,’Merrill floundered, adorably, then succumbed to a smile. ‘We all have to be somewhere.’

  



End file.
